Fellini Dreams

Transcript

Welcome to Dream Auguries. Tonight we explore some of the dreams of the great Italian director, Federico Fellini.

In 1960, at the age of 40, Fellini was at a high point in his career. That May, La Dolce Vita premiered at Cannes to rapturous international acclaim. In Italy, it set records for attendance at theaters. Nearly 14 million Italians saw it. (It is estimated that the population of Italy, at that time, was 50 million -- so nearly 25%, or 1 in 4 Italians saw the film.)

But with such fame came uncertainty as well about his next film. Encouraged by his Jungian analyst, Fellini began recording his dreams. Not just writing them down as text but often illustrating them in his wonderful cartoon style. He began the book on December first of that year, drawing a cartoon of a balding man from behind and writing: "In my dreams, I almost always see myself from behind. I am thinner, just like I was twenty or thirty years ago."

He would continue this Dream Journal for the next 30 years. His last entry was in 1990.

In one lengthy passage from 1983, Fellini dreams of walking with Orson Welles through Cinecitta, the 99-acre studio in Italy. Welles tells him: "You spend too much time seeking the muses help." Later he sees Lina Wertmueller and her husband at the window of a little building up the street. They invite him inside, but he writes that he "moved away rapidly."

Three years after starting the The Book of Dreams, Fellini would complete 8 1/2 -- a film about a director facing a creative block. The film opens with one of cinema's most famous dream sequences. (You can follow along watching the YouTube link on our website: www.dreamauguries.com.)

He packs so much into just three minutes. Turn up your volume but you won't hear a single sound for a full minute. And that sound is the agitated breathing of the film's director, Guido Anselm, played by Marcello Mastroianni, stuck in traffic.

He gazes around at the faces all around him and we hear the squeaking of his hand on the interior of the car window, as smoke begins to enter the car. (The lecherous old man, the busload of people with their arms sticking out the windows are classic Fellini images.)

Two minutes in, Guido breaks free of the car and with arms outstretched in cruciform fashion takes flight.

But just when he feels himself flying free, he looks down and realizes he is tethered like a kite to someone on a beach. (We even get a glimpse of the scaffolding we'll see at the END of the film.)

Then, another 30 seconds in, a man on horseback, "the counsellor" rides up to announce the judgement about the airborne filmmaker: "Down for good." The man holding the rope releases Guido and he falls toward the ocean. And just before he hits the water, the director startles up in bed.

It's an audacious opening, pulling us directly into dream logic. And certainly it was one of the inspirations for the opening of my own film: Dreaming Grand Avenue.

One final note: The New York publisher, Rizzoli, honored the centennial of the birth of Fellini by republishing both volumes of his dream journals in a single large, colorful edition. There's a link to the Rizzoli edition on our website.

Dream Auguries is a weekly reflection series for insomniacs, lucid dreamers, oracles and soothsayers, magicians and conjurors of all kinds. It's bonus content for the film, Dreaming Grand Avenue, now streaming on cable, written and directed by Hugh Schulze. Our theme music was composed and performed by Tony Scott-Green and sound design by Kevin O'Rourke.

Good night.